CD ECM Records Duo Gazzana: Five Pieces - Takemitsu / Hindemith / Janacek / Silvestrov

2011

Natascia Gazzana - vioara
Raffaella Gazzana - pian

Toru Takemitsu - Distance Du Fee (1951)
Paul Hindemith - Sonata In E (1935)
Leos Janacek - Sonata (1914, rev 1921)
Valentin Silvestrov - Five Pieces (2004)


This is the recording debut of Italian sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana, named for the “Five Pieces” for violin and piano by Valentin Silvestrov which conclude the album. These works – a gently-pulsing elegy, a serenade, an intermezzo, a barcarole, a ghostly nocturne - receive their international release here in a context which combines the familiar and the far-flung, as Duo Gazzana finds creative affinities between the music of four very different composers. “The programme as a whole is typical of the duo’s inquiring and sensitive approach to repertory”, writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes. “What we hear here is a vital freshness”.

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'First recording of the young and highly promising sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana with the album “Five Pieces”. The album title is taken from the work by Valentin Silvestrov, living Ukrainian composer, and the duo, in ‘Elegie’, develop – from a few traces of notes, and with candid pictorial simplicity - lyrical themes which allude to the world of the romantic ‘Wanderer’. (…) The duo possess a wide spectrum of interpretative possibilities, as they show in Takemitsu’s crepuscular ‘Distance de fée’, in the structured symmetries of Hindemith’s Sonate in E, and in a passionate sonata by Janáček, where technical mastery is united with the ability to dive deep into the tormented Slavic soul.'
Riccardo Lenzi, L’Espresso